Human moods and emotions have two essential aspects, hedonic tone and arousal — the first is a measure of how intrinsically pleasant or enjoyable the emotion is, while the second is a measure of its intrinsic ability to push you to “do something”. In this view, ‘anxiety’ is a very negative state whose content makes you very unrestful about something: you’re ready to jump, kick, run from, or scream about something (even tho you might not always consciously identify the thing that’s causing your anxiety); ‘depression’ is also a very negative state but whose arousal parameter is very low, thus you tend to be lifeless, not wanting to do anything about nothing. And this pattern continues with positive states, where those with low arousal make you feel very calm and fulfilled (the extreme here would be the opium euphoria), while others drive you to seek action/doing (here the extreme might be a cocaine frenzy).
The interesting thing is that these aspects are influenced by culture (some researchers say that they’re heavily influenced), and studies point to the fact that in highly competitive societies individuals tend to enjoy more the positive feelings marked by high arousal (see how groups of kids in US like to watch all sorts of activities, like someone humilliating another in a competition or with a prank, while they scream, jump and pull on each-other in collective rapture — that’s the arrousal component of their positive emotions); while in other societies, that have a culture of listening, sharing and togetherness, the individuals show a deeper enjoyment of positive emotions low on arousal, with less physical manifestations.
Our perceptions and behaviors are strongly yet very subtly guided by our cultural indoctrination acting on our moods and emotions — so much so we never realize it. An individual raised in a very competitive “Wall Street” society is set on “doing”, for him life has no meaning without that doing and without the perpetual fight to get on top and unlock the ability of doing it on a grander scale. Unfortunately, betting at the stock-market, like most of the compulsive “doings” in our current global society, isn’t that useful, nor as smart and glamorous as we collectively hallucinate it to be — instead of benefit and progress, these activities are rather coming with great cost on society. There’s no virtue in this endeavor, no great purpose — only drives and itches that need to be resolved. The human world is a mad roiling swarm of individuals trying to do for the sake of doing.
But the thing about emotions and moods is that they are intrinsically valuable for the individual who experiences them — it would be very hard or impossible for him to understand the negativity of his actions from the positivity he’s feeling while (or previous, or after) doing them. You cannot convey to someone whose raptured every day in his/her activity (perhaps a brilliant PR person who’s job is to skilfully mask the negative undertakings of some company or some political party) that he mustn’t be that happy with what he does, hence find other things to pursue. The logical tautology here would be that “feeling good always prevents you from feeling bad” — and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
The most glamorous and competent doers in today’s society are destined to be remembered in the minds of future civilizations as unconscious individuals made lame by their animal predispositions and shiny cultural motifs.
Like Brian Eno says in the link, “in our culture we’re encouraged to take control”, encouraged to manipulate things and people alike — our positive feelings are conditioned on that. But a healthy prosper society is bound to be built on a balanced mixture of high and low arousal positive experiences, and on communion and cooperation rather than one-upmanship and exploitation.
